WWNIATT
Bob, WB6JPI
A beautiful day for
a hunt.
It had rained a couple days before and the
I had found this
spot for use
in the AllDay hunt I did a couple years ago that terminated at my
daughters
place in
I checked it out
and the
access road to the unmapped powerline road was gated. It wasn’t before.
I was
very upset because this spot was nasty.
It was nasty
because it is a
range of hills about 2000 ft high that is 5 miles x 5 miles and has no
paved
roads but has a myriad of dirt roads. None of all these unmapped dirt
roads
seemed to connect to the powerline road. But now it too was
inaccessible.
Secondly the site for the transmitter could see the tops of all of the
large
mountains around
I did a dirty
trick. I used
Google Earth and made a map (13 pages) of all of the dirt roads and
plotted a
course that would connect to the powerline road. With map in hand I
drove the
course last Tuesday and I got through in 2 wheel drive although some of
the
“connector” roads were very ugly. I mean VERY ugly. This road was of
decomposed
granite and had great traction when dry, but VERY slippery when wet. It
was dry
(mostly).
For those who care,
the site
was in the southeastern end of the badlands, between the 60 FWY on the
North,
N33 53.208 W117
0.586.
The original plan
was to run
my 40 Watt T7 transmitter into a 10 el Horizontal beam pointed at
My backup
transmitter T9, is
a 1 watt AF6O box that came on fine but was too weak to make the Baldy
bounce
(They couldn’t hear it at all). I shifted the antenna for a bounce off
of San
Gorgonio and they couldn’t hear that either. Bad news. I called them on
the
Cell phone and told them to go east on the 60 FWY and if they didn’t
hear anything
by
We had two hunters.
It was a
shame that more didn’t come as it was a most challenging and fun hunt.
Deryl
had a very stretching experience with his electric Ford on the very
very nasty
road and Bob found several new ways to
get lost (no, he didn’t get all the way to Big Bear). I hope they write
of
their experiences. We all had a nice Dinner in
Bob, N6ZHZ 123.6 miles
Deryl, N6AIN 145.6 miles
Be sure to see the
pictures
on the photo page